sad

If this was 2010, RIM launching BBM on Android and iOS would have been viewed as a nod to open communication and a platform-agnostic product strategy. If this was 2010, it would have been marked as a win for RIM and a sign that company is here to fight. If this was 2010, RIM might still have a chance.
But at the close of 2013, BBM launching on Android and iOS is a swan song for Research In… Read More

As you might have noticed, TechCrunch went down entirely (thanks to WordPress VIP), sporting a fun “502” error. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s the skinny on why you might see a 502 error:
The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in the attempt to fulfill the request.
If you know… Read More

Joel and I were so angry at each other in this picture that Cat Schwartz literally had to keep us apart.
I don’t usually want to bring people’s personal lives into focus here on CG. After all, we’re dedicated to, as Joel himself always pointed out, self-deprecation and dick jokes. However, since Joel is my mentor and friend I wanted to point you guys to a great interview… Read More

Sorry to put a damper on your night, but it looks like the artist who provided the amazing cover art for Doom has died. Don Ivan Punchatz provided illustrations for a number of publications, but perhaps no single piece of his is as widely recognized as the Space Marine gunning down that demonic horde, combined with the mechanized lettering we all know so well. The best we can do is say… Read More

It seems the Palm Pre is too little, too late for Sprint. According to Sprint’s Q2 financials for 2009, they’ve lost nearly $400 million dollars, and “total wireless customers declined by approximately 257,000.” It’s not all doom-and-gloom, though! Sprint can smile about “18 consecutive months of improvement in Customer Care Satisfaction and First Call… Read More

One of the most trusted names in news for decades during an era when America needed honesty and good reporting has died today at the age of 92. Walter Cronkite reported on the Moon landing, the assassination of JFK, and the Vietnam war, among countless other subjects. It’s a stretch calling ourselves “journalists” when compared to guys like Walter, but if we may be allowed… Read More

After all the lip service paid by the Associated Press against wholesale IP theft, I wonder if this is their ultimate solution: to produce content so lifeless and undesirable that no one will want to steal it. I’d chalk this up to dude having a bad day but, thanks to AP’s byline policies, we don’t even know who this poor guy is. Read More

Dell, a company that makes computers, is down 63 percent from $784 million last year, leaving them at $290 million in net income. Total revenue fell $12.34 billion.
Mr. Dell himself isn’t very worried – he expects a replacement cycle to hit with the launch of Windows 7. Market share fell 34 percent in desktop sales and 20 percent in notebook sales, leaving plenty of room for growth… Read More

Sadly, all three have short lifespans
Video giant Blockbuster can’t get any money to save itself from bankruptcy. Thanks to years of heavy fighting with Netflix, the company has essentially spent itself into the ground and, thanks to the credit crunch, is looking at closing its doors. Read More

Latest Crunch Report

I kind of hope this is some sort of sick, twisted joke but apparently a 14-year-old boy in China was recently killed when the pneumatic gas cylinder – the thing that controls the vertical height adjustment — in his chair exploded, sending fragments of the chair into his rectum. Read More

The poor bastard who got a tattoo of the motivational “Blue Monster” has been laid off. Blue Monster Man, Dan Woodman, writes:
Working at Microsoft has been the greatest experience of my life and I have no desire to forget about it. And even if I don’t get back into Microsoft right away (which is, by the way, my plan!), then I have a reminder that even outside of Microsoft… Read More

RIM’s BlackBerry Storm, the biggest lump of crap to come out of Canada since Celine Dion, sold 500,000 units in its first month. Everyone who was everyone basically told RIM that this was a heap but did they listen? Nope.
“I found myself wanting to throw it in the ocean due to my frustration with its overall usability,” said Steven Golub, a longtime Verizon customer from… Read More

I was a bad nerd. I wanted to do all the nerd things – program, play D&D, read fantasy – but I was no good at BASIC, didn’t have any friends, and for some reason I could never get into hardcore fantasy sci-fi novels. Every Christmas we’d go to my grandmother’s house in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a little town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and every… Read More

The motherboard humming away in my nice Tempest case right now is an Abit IP35 Pro, and unfortunately it will be the last Abit motherboard I ever bought. Because respected enthusiast hardware maker Abit is riding off into the sunset. Read More

[image credit: Farriella for the NY Daily News]
I was hoping we’d make it through this Black Friday without one of these incidents, but unfortunately it’s happened again: If you haven’t heard already, a worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart was crushed underneath the feet of hundreds of shoppers while trying to hold back the crowd. Shopping events are notoriously dangerous in… Read More

And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final rewind.
My friend, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case, so please do be kind.
I’ve lived a life that’s full.
I’ve played copies of Lynch’s Lost Highway;
And more, much more than this,
I did it my way. Read More

Think back on the last party you attended. Perhaps you enjoy sitting around an impeccably decorated living room and sipping glasses of cold, frosty beer poured by a nattily attired waitress named Nicole hired for the night so the hostess could mingle with the glitterati in attendance. Or perhaps it was at your friend Terry’s house where you ended up puking all over his couch after… Read More

Tyler Loch, maker of VisualHub, one of the best applications for converting video on the Mac ever in the whole wide world, is citing health and relationship reasons for closing up shop and potentially releasing the product as open source.
Loch’s company, Techspansion, will cease support and Apple had nothing to do with the decision. Loch wrote: Read More

Can you hear me now?
When I was in high school I used to go to Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio with a buddy of mine, ostensibly to take part in a Scouting activity. There we met with one of their best UNIX guys and, well, learned UNIX. To be honest, it was like getting high school physics lessons from Stephen Hawking. This guy knew the shell inside and out and he challenged us in a way… Read More